---
id: cli
title: CLI
---


## Bitcoin-s command line interface

The [cli](/api/org/bitcoins/cli) project is meant to be a bitcoin-s command line interface (cli). 

You only need to do one of the two sections below (Building the command line interface) or (Native binaries), and we recommend doing the first option because it is simpler.

### Building the command line interface

You must first have [bitcoin-s properly installed](../getting-setup) on your machine, after which you should be able to build the cli with
```bashrc
sbt cli/universal:stage
```

After running that command you should find the executable here:

```bash
./app/cli/target/universal/stage/bin/bitcoin-s-cli
```

### Executing commands
You can ask the client for help with

```bash
./app/cli/target/universal/stage/bin/bitcoin-s-cli --help
Usage: bitcoin-s-cli [options] [<cmd>]

  -n, --network <value>  Select the active network.
  --debug                Print debugging information
  -h, --help             Display this help message and exit
  <cmd>                  The command and arguments to be executed. Try bitcoin-s-cli help for a list of all commands
```


Now you are ready to start the server that the cli sends commands to. Take a look at our [server](server.md) documentation on how to build and start the server.

### Native binaries

Bitcoin-s also supports building native executables for various platforms supported by the [graalvm native image](https://www.graalvm.org/reference-manual/native-image/) tool.

You can build by using the [native image plugin for sbt](https://github.com/scalameta/sbt-native-image). This will download the appropriate graalvm
version and the native image tool, and then build the cli

```bashrc
sbt cli/nativeImage
```

After the build is done, you can find the artifact here locally

```bashrc
app/cli/target/native-image/bitcoin-s-cli
```

We also publish native image binaries every time we merge a commit to master on github.
As an example, you can [see the artifacts](https://github.com/bitcoin-s/bitcoin-s/actions?query=workflow%3A%22Native+Image+bitcoin-s-cli%22)
in the upper right hand corner.

If you don't want to build the `bitcoin-s-cli` yourself, you can download it for your platform there.